Thankfully, there are others in the city who are taking vehicular injuries more seriously — notably the N.Y.P.D. I highly recommend this excellent Times report on the recently renamed and revamped Collision Investigation Squad, which is tasked with unraveling the circumstances around the city’s deadly car crashes.

The article is full of great, gritty glimpses into this world, including this quote: “'On the midnight, you get a lot of speed,” Detective Robert Saporito said. “A lot of death.” It also expertly chronicles the compelling mix of traditional police work, physics equations and advanced robotics required to investigate these incidents. And it explains how the N.Y.P.D.’s approach to investigating crashes changed crucially in the wake of a lawsuit over a pedestrian death.

Basically, the previous policy was to launch a criminal investigation only if the crash involved a fatality — which meant that, if the critically injured died days after the crash (as happened in the case of the lawsuit), investigators were left to follow an investigative trail gone cold. Now the Collision Investigation Squad is involved whenever someone is listed by a paramedic as being in critical condition.

Also telling is the unit’s new name: previously, the officers who investigated these crashes did so under the title of Accident Investigation Squad — a nomenclature that suggested an institutional willingness to consider fatal crashes as unavoidable happenstance. That’s no longer the case, in both name and action — something for which every sentient citizen should be grateful.

Bruce Grierson wrote this week’s cover story about Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist who has conducted experiments that involve manipulating environments to turn back subjects’ perceptions of their own age.Read more…